Luna Lovegood and the Forgotten Circle
by Hawksquill
Summary: Lily saving Harry inspires witches to rediscover magic lost for centuries. Luna grows up learning ancient crafts of women's magic at a witchcraft school for girls. She fights the tide of darkness with alternative magic, putting her at odds with the Ministry, Hogwarts, and Harry Potter. Luna must choose between traditions when a darker power rises to threaten her brave new world.
1. Chapter 1: Prologue

**Author's Note:** This is an AU from the point of view of Luna Lovegood that primarily parallels Harry Potter's time at Hogwarts. The story diverges from canon in multiple ways, including the introduction of original characters, spells, and new forms of magic. There are three primary divergences:

1) Luna's mother is a Seer named Cressida.

2) Luna is one year younger than canon, making her two years younger than the trio and one year younger than Ginny Weasley.

3) Luna does not attend Hogwarts. With her mother, she founds a witchcraft school for girls.

I live for reviews good, bad, or indifferent, so please leave your thoughts!

* * *

 **Prologue**

 _October 31, 1981_

Blood red claw marks streaked the sky, marring the pocked surface of the moon. It ached to look at the moon. Large and pale and swollen like her breasts. The only source of light in this world of darkness and blood, black and red. But so many people, people with haggard faces, averted their eyes from its cool radiance. They scorned the moon. Why? She did not know.

The people seemed to shrivel around her, their bodies contorted, lumps of skin flaking off of their shadow-creased faces. Yet still, they rejected the moon. She found herself drawn to its light, which had cast off its bloody red tint and become pure white. A few other women were walking towards the moon, arms outstretched, and she joined them. Somehow she knew they were women from the curves of their hips and breasts and lips. She could not sense whether the other people on the ground were men or women or something else. Their bodies seemed too damaged and fragmented to be anything. The women were whole. They seemed to float above the detritus, and she floated with them.

"Come," she offered her hand to a crumpled lump on the ground, "the moon will heal you."

The figure shrunk away from her, wheezing. When she touched the part of its body that she imagined must have once been its shoulder, its entire mangled arm came away in her hand. She opened her mouth to let out a shriek but no sound would come. She fell to her knees, trying to reattach the arm even as it crumbled in her hands. She felt her own skin melting off of her face and arms and stomach.

Another woman approached her and with the gentleness of a mother's touch turned her back to the moonlight. When the other woman spoke, she heard her own voice.

"My child. You will be scorned, we will all be scorned. They will not see the light, at least not yet. First we must reclaim the moon and rebuild her sacred circle. They will not see the light until the light is bright enough to blot out the shadows. A dark queen, a raven queen will rise and she will be powerful enough to bring them the light. And she will be of your blood. The blood of the moon and the womb and of all of us. She will rise and make us the advisors and shapers and crafters of the world once more. She will nourish the world. The moon will nourish the world once more. The moon will rule once more."

She felt her eyes drawn to a figure rising above the mass of bodies. A long-haired woman rode a broomstick higher and higher, impossibly high. She traversed the sky, gesturing wildly with her hands and throwing her body into strange shapes that made the women below gasp. One by one, the red clouds surrounding the moon dispersed. The women continued her work. Occasionally she seemed to tug at her hair, which trailed over the edge of the broomstick like a curtain. Eventually there was nothing in the sky but the moon and the witch on her broomstick.

The woman turned to face the moon, obscuring her movements from the crowd. As she moved her hands in the air, over her broomstick, over her own body in passionately synchronized movements, undulating primal sounds came from her mouth.

A drop of blood fell from the sky and into the group of women. Then another. Then another. The third landed on her cheek with a soft metallic noise.

The drops began to fall in earnest and the women began to scream, believing blood was raining down upon them. But it wasn't blood. It wasn't even rain.

She was one of the first to hold her hand out to catch the pale liquid. It felt thick and slightly gelatinous cupped in her hands. The smell was earthy, primal, and sour. It felt natural on her skin. She threw her head back and opened her mouth to the deluge, sticking her tongue out with the inquisitiveness and reckless abandon of a child.

It was milk.

"It's milk! It's not blood, it's milk!" She shouted to some of the others who had cowered trying to protect their skin.

Other women began to taste the moon's milk. It healed their wounds. Their skin began to glow. They took off their clothes and splashed in the puddles of milk, laughing and frolicking together. She linked arms with a few others and began dancing in a circle, spinning faster and faster, shrieking with delight and relief. Their bodies were theirs and new and fresh and cleansed and beautiful. They hadn't realized how much their old bodies ached until they found relief.

Even the crumbled masses huddled broken on the ground were restored. Their bodies slowly began to take shape again and the gashes in their skin healed. The moon will nourish.

She looked around the joyous crowd for their savior, but the woman with the broomstick was nowhere to be found. The moon will rule.

* * *

Cressida Lovegood awoke to find her breasts leaking milk and her swollen belly glowing with strange colored lights. She sat up with a start and prodded her belly sharply. There were several tortuously long beats. It was only then that she remembered the fairy lights Xenophilius had enchanted to swarm around her belly for Halloween. She finally felt a kick beneath her expectant hand and sighed with relief. _Good baby._

"Here's your juniper tea, my goddess…oh, what a sight." Xenophilius stood in the doorway with his hand over his heart. Cressida smiled, sitting up in bed to take the mug from her husband's hands.

"Are you sure you don't want my help in the garden? You know how much I love the Halloween harvest…" she wiped a smudge of soil from his nose as he kissed her on the cheek. His lips grazed her neck and the hollows of her collarbone before moving to kiss the breast milk, which had already stained the dried flowers and leaves of her homemade Halloween dress.

"Nonsense, my love. You need to rest. The herbs will be just as potent; it doesn't matter who does the harvesting, as long as it's All Hollow's Eve," his fingers roved the contours of her pregnant body. The large fairy wings they had constructed together out of willow and petrified butterflies fluttered as he grazed them.

"I'm not so sure, part of me think a woman's touch makes a difference. And I'm not an invalid, you know, Xeno," Cressida bristled crossly, shifting to find a comfortable spot on the bed. She was already bursting at the seams of the dress she had made less than a week ago.

"Of course not, my love. But not many are blessed with your gift. This sacred day is about more than the harvest. If you feel well enough for the bonfire, perhaps you may See something."

Cressida's fingers drummed on her belly. "I think I might have done, while you were in the garden. About the baby."

"On All Hallow's Eve? What did you See? Oh, how splendid, my queen, my fairy queen!"

"I don't remember much. There was a queen, actually. A dark queen. And the moon. I think she's going to be a girl." Her husband's eyes were rapt upon her face as he cupped her belly in his hands.

"She's going to be important. She's going to rule the moon...something about restoring the moon's circle. There was milk, but maybe that was just because I was leaking, and blood. She's going to be queen of the moon. We should call her Luna."

"Luna." Xenophilius whispered.

"We're both fair but maybe she'll be dark. Your mum had darker hair, didn't she? And there's Andie of course. Maybe she'll be born during a full moon."

The tea lay cold and forgotten as the Lovegoods continued their Halloween festivities. Xenophilius blessed the harvest and left a selection of crops under the oldest tree in their garden as thanks to the goddesses and fairies who had blessed them. They started a bonfire and burned a potent combination of acrid herbs in an attempt to induce further visions. They cut open the lushest pomegranate and read the omens of its seeds before rubbing it on Cressida's belly. The fruits of their harvest and the sweat of their bodies caused their homespun organic costumes to disintegrate and fall away. They danced naked in front of the fire until Cressida grew weary. As they lay in bed struggling to keep their eyes open, they both said it was the happiest night of their lives.

That year, they wished for a more bountiful harvest than usual, thinking of more than themselves and their garden. They thought only of Luna.

* * *

Cressida awoke the next morning to Xenophilus's voice. Still drowsy, she smiled and rolled over to nuzzle him. But he wasn't in bed.

" _Protego totalum_ … _repello inimicum_ …," came her husband's muffled voice from the window.

"Xeno? What's happened? What's wrong?"

"More people are being killed. People we know. No one's safe… _fianto duri_ ," he cast another charm out the open window.

She held her stomach. "What? Who's been killed?"

"The Potters. James Potter and Lily Evans. Remember them? Gryffindors? He must have finally convinced her to look twice at him after we left Hogwarts, the clod."

"Well, I'm very sorry they're dead, but I can't say I'm surprised. Their little group was never the brightest nor the safest, were they? Toast for breakfast, love?" Cressida held the bedpost for support as she hobbled out of bed.

"No. Don't go downstairs. Not safe. Here, wear this." Xenophilius draped a string of garlic, herbs, dirigible plums, and other vegetation around her neck.

"Xeno, if people reacted this way to every murder, no one would ever leave their homes! Besides, we can't harvest some of these herbs again until this time next year, we have to use them sparingly, remember?"

"It's not just James and Lily. They have a son. He wanted to kill their son. He's after babies now, too." Xenophilius paced across the room. His hands reached out to Cressida and her stomach, pulled back, fingered the protective wreath around his neck, tapped against the walls as he paced.

"No. Not the baby, he didn't kill the baby." Cressida fell back against the bed, clutching her stomach. Her husband crossed the room and put a hand to her back as she sat down.

"The boy is still alive. No one knows why or how, but he survived the killing curse. So many theories swirling about. We'll need a special issue to discuss all the possibilities, yes, yes. My first instinct was that Lily was aware of the Dark Lord's intentions and concocted some kind of protective potion for him. Was she privy to some Muggle remedy of which we are ignorant? Or perhaps an uncommon herbal recipe…" he paced to a pile of books on the floor and picked up a particularly worn volume.

"Marshmallow has been out of fashion for years now. Others think the child isn't really a child at all, but is an adult in hiding under the effects of an extreme anti-ageing potion or Polyjuice Potion. Perhaps one of the Potters' less savory friends, or Dumbledore himself. Some suspect it was the power of the mother's love that saved the child. She apparently sacrificed herself for him. But some are suggesting the child was already undead in some way…"

"It was the mother's love," Cressida said with absolute certainty.

"Yes, yes, very old magic, apparently. But I'm still inclined…"

"No, I can feel it in my bones. I would do the same for her, for Luna. And it would save her."

For the first time in her life, Cressida felt magic coursing through her body without a wand in her hand. She felt powerful.


	2. Chapter 2

The stars rotated in their eternal orbits on the walls and ceiling of little Luna Lovegood's nursery. Her father emblazoned the name of each constellation in the midnight blue gaps between the celestial clusters. Her mother enchanted the miniature galaxy to rotate just like the original. On the wall in front of her daughter's crib, Cressida painted a moon that was larger than life. Xenophilius took his wand to his wife's handiwork and wrote "LUNA" in script charmed to glow with silvery moonlight.

Their daughter slept bathed in moonlight every night. It tinged her blonde hair silver and gave her pale skin an ethereal glow. Luna was at the center of the mimetic universe her parents created for her, always aware of the world swirling around her. Sometimes the walls of her room felt like unmanageable chaos. She was too young to understand that the stars and planets moved in a measured and orderly dance. She still believed her parents were her anchors, the most predictable things in her life even though her daddy fluttered about sometimes. The world didn't seem so scary when her mother cradled her in her arms and pointed out the names of all the stars, or when her father lifted her in the air and made roaring sounds like a dragon.

When Mummy and Daddy weren't there and Luna felt overwhelmed or scared or her gums ached, she often gazed at the glowing moon on her wall. It was the only thing in the room other than the furniture that was not constantly moving.

"Do you know why we painted that big bright moon over there, my love?" asked Cressida one day as she sat nursing her daughter in the old rocking chair in the corner.

"Moona," repeated Luna proudly, lifting her hand from her mother's breast and pointing at the moon, then at herself.

"Yes, exactly. It's the moon. And your name means moon. Because you're queen of the moon. But do you know what else?" Luna suckled in silence, watching her mother's lips move.

"You were born on a cold stormy night in the middle of winter. It was dark and cold and Mummy was very scared. But when you were born, the moon broke through the clouds. And I saw you, and you had a halo of golden hair and the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen. You brought light into this world of darkness. That is your destiny, Luna. You will be queen of the moon and bring light to the people who live in darkness. You will be a dark queen, a raven queen. I don't know quite what that means yet, but we're going to find out. I'm going to make sure your birth right is restored to you, my sweet girl. The circle will rise again. And we're going to need as much knowledge and power as we can get for what lies ahead of us…" A shadow passed over Cressida's face.

"Luna?"

The child was asleep, her cheek pressed against her mother's breast.

Cressida raised her wand.

* * *

Luna Lovegood hated the alphabet.

She turned the paper upside down and squinted at the peculiar markings littering the page. They looked jagged and vicious, like teeth or claws. Luna ran her fingers over the harsh crenulations of the inky letters.

"Daddy, is this where paper cuts come from?"

"Hmm, sugar plum?" Xenophilius looked up from his attempts to feed parchment into his antique typewriter. Father and daughter sat across from each other at the Lovegoods' kitchen table in Ottery St. Catchpole, with Cressida's ornamental crystal wind chime dangling between them.

Luna mimed cutting her little finger on the craggy spikes of a w, the funny little letter she called the saw.

"Ah, ah, ahhh!" she ran her hands erratically over the page and wriggled her fingers as if blood was spurting out of them.

Xenophilius smiled without raising his eyes from his typewriter, which had begun to spew purple smoke.

"Very clever, darling. But paper cuts are caused by miniscule tree and animal sprites who are not happy about being pulped and turned into paper and parchment. Although they're not fond of being turned into Sunday roast or wands, either…"

"Well _I_ think it's something to do with these nasty letters," Luna declared with a huff. "Maybe all the thoughts aren't happy about being turned into words and imprisoned in ink. Why do people even write down their ideas, anyway? I think they should be allowed to float freely through the air. Think of all the brilliant thoughts people aren't having because someone else has already caught them and trapped them in a musty old book somewhere."

"Words aren't the trap, Luna, but the vessel. Ideas can't get very far without words. Don't you want to learn the words for spells? Don't you want to write your ideas down and publish them in _The Quibbler_ so other people can read and respond and learn how clever you are? Ouch!"

The typewriter had bitten her father's finger in protest of his tinkering. Luna giggled. Giving the contraption up as a bad job, Xenophilius began to scribble with his quill. The scratching noise gave Luna goose pimples.

"I don't particularly care about being clever. I want to _discover_ things. Clever people are too busy being clever to find anything new. Oh, but Daddy, do you have to write things down to do magic?"

"Yes, in a way. You have to read and write and practice the words."

"How unpleasant! Perhaps I shan't do magic at all."

Her father's pot of ink skittered across the table, drenching his work in a creeping blot of ink. " _Scourgify_ …Do not jest about such things, Luna."

She started, taken aback, before averting her eyes and tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear.

"Besides, you'll need to read and write if you want to go to Hogwarts. There is a myriad of secrets to be discovered in that great old castle. Wouldn't you like that?"

"Yes, Daddy. But…"

"Hush now. I am a man of words and ink myself, and I need to finish this issue today. I'm really blowing the lid off the exploitation of ghost labor at Muggle haunted houses. The Ministry is really getting too close to their First Minister or whatever he's called. I wonder if the Hallows could have something to do with this…" Xenophilius reached for the gold pendant hanging around his neck. He stumbled out of the kitchen, muttering to himself.

Luna puffed out her cheeks and blew air through her lips. Right. Reading. Dad told her to do her reading. Time to sit still and do her reading. He _did_ have a point, she supposed. She settled into her chair and squinted at the page.

Luna bit her lip.

Her parents always told her how smart she was, what a clever girl she was, how she was destined for great things at Hogwarts and beyond. They played with her and taught her constellations and herbal remedies and explored the garden with her. Her mother braided her hair and her father tickled behind her ears to keep the nargles away. They called her their fairy and their princess and their moon and their raven queen. And Luna believed it. She believed it all.

But neither Cressida nor Xenophilius had bothered to teach their daughter to read. They read her bedtime stories sometimes, but they were just as likely to tell her old myths and fairy stories older than the written word. Often, they entertained her with Xenophilius's ideas and Cressida's prophecies. They told her of a princess named Luna who would one day rule the moon and bring about the return of moon magic.

Luna stared blankly at the jumble of markings on the page. She could decipher individual letters, but they did not yet magically coalesce into the words she knew so well. There was an "l," and a few lines later a "u." And then an "n" and an "a" right next to each other! Luna. Her name. She recognized it from the moon on her wall. In fact, most of her knowledge of letters came from the swirling array of labelled constellations on her walls.

She didn't even know _what_ she was supposed to be reading. Her parents seemed to have decided one day that it was about time Luna learned to read. She was a clever girl, she could figure it out. In fact, she probably already had a natural aptitude for it. How could she, the prophesied one, not? They began calling Luna inside from playing in the garden from time to time and telling her it was time for her reading lessons. They then unceremoniously plopped a book or notebook or an issue of _The Quibbler_ in front of her and left her to her own devices.

Five year old Luna could not make head or tail of the regularity of these "lessons." They did not come every Monday or every Wednesday or even every other week. They didn't seem to follow the path of the stars or the cycle of the moon. They didn't even seem to follow her parents' whims. One day they would mention that she was due for a reading lesson (one time Cressida even Saw a particularly gruelling lesson in Luna's future involving a tome bigger than her head) and the next day they forgot it completely.

Luna hated reading lessons almost as much as she hated the alphabet. And because her parents didn't seem to abide by any schedule in this world or the next, Luna had not yet found a way to avoid them.

She listened for her father's frenzied mutterings but the only sound in the kitchen was the tinkling of the wind chime.

Luna folded the square of paper in half, then half again. She creased the page until it was small enough to fit on the tip of her littlest finger. Then she touched it to the tip of her tongue, tasted it, crinkled her face in distaste, and swallowed. The dry parchment scratched her throat and made her cough. That one had been particularly unpleasant, but she had to absorb the knowledge somehow, she supposed.

Luna wasn't particularly fussed either way. If she was destined to bring forth a new kind of magic, why did she need to bother with any of this tosh? She had decided long ago that her moon magic wouldn't involve any kind of reading or writing whatsoever. Spells seemed equally pointless to her, so she might have to experiment with nonverbal magic….

The sound of laughter from the sitting room punctured Luna's balloon of silence. Just as quickly as she had contemplated her future powers, her mind turned to her mother's book club. She didn't want to _read_ , but perhaps she could catch some of the ideas that were bound to be floating around the air in a room full of a dozen witches. She skipped down the hall, wondering absentmindedly what the books the witches' club read tasted like.

"…Furk what?!" a woman's voice exclaimed with a chortle from inside the room.

"Futhorc," said a stern witch with square spectacles standing at the front of the room. Most of the women giggled in titillation. The tall witch hushed them.

"Oh, admit it Minerva, it sounds an awful lot like…"

"I will not admit such a thing, Amelia. Especially not with little ones around." Minerva McGonnagall gestured to the door, where a small head of blonde hair lurked.

"Have you finished your reading, love?" asked Cressida from her perch on the sofa. Luna looked at her feet before nodding with a shy smile. Behind her back, she squeezed her crossed fingers until they bleached white. Professor McGonnagall looked at the young girl with a frown.

"What a good girl! Come here, my love," said a plump ginger woman.

"Hello, Mrs. Weasley," said Luna as she settled into her neighbor's lap. Her fingers twisted in the worn familiar frays of Mrs. Weasley's jumper.

Professor McGonnagall cleared her throat. "As I was saying, the futhorc are an ancient system of Anglo-Saxon runes. The name futhorc, which you all seemed to find so amusing, is simply a combination of the names for the first three runes, much like the word alphabet."

"The alphabet is nasty! I do not like it _at all_ ," declared Luna with great fervor. The women all chuckled and Luna received several pats on the head. She felt a sudden urge to wash her hair in a solution of rosewater and dirigible plums. She scratched her scalp repeatedly, taking pleasure in feeling her roughness rubbing against the tenderness of her own flesh.

"Don't think of it as an alphabet, then," said McGonnagall with a prim brusqueness that made Luna sit up straighter. "You may think of it as…a special code you need to decipher. The important thing is to learn it, no matter what you call it."

A code. Luna liked the sound of that.

"Now the first letter, like I said, is most commonly pronounced "feoh." It looks like this." McGonnagall drew the rune in the air with a trail of gold emanating from the tip of her wand.

"It looks like an arrow with only two fletches," she said, pointing to the half of the asymmetrical rune with two notches.

"The fletches of feoh come first. Repeat after me. Go on, it helps memory retention."

"The fletches of feoh come first," they all said obediently. Several women raised their wands in the air to recreate the shape of the rune. Luna traced the magical code on the flesh of her forearm. Her skin tingled in a way that it never did when she swallowed the materials of her parents' haphazard reading lessons. She could feel knowledge and power coursing through her veins. _So this is why people write things down._

"Next is ur. This one is easy because it's an upside down 'u.' Observe." Professor McGonnagall traced the rune with her wand again. When she craned her neck, Luna recognized one of the letters from her name on the wall of her room.

In half an hour, Luna learned more about Anglo-Saxon runes than she ever had about the English alphabet. By the end of the professor's session, she could recite and draw all 33 runes from memory. She could even decode runic messages with only a little help from Professor McGonnagall and the syllabary.

"This has all been tremendously helpful, Minerva," said Cressida as she pulled Luna onto her lap.  
"I know I'm looking forward to learning what secrets may be discovered with these runes. Perhaps even _in_ these runes. I wonder whether we should also turn our attention to Ogham. Individual letters have been correlated with sacred woods, and I'd like to see if any of it correlates with wand lore…"

"Er, sorry, but what's Ogham?" asked Mrs. Fawcett, a rail thin woman from the village with mousy brown hair.

"What's Ogham?!" asked Cressida with a snort, "only the language of the most great and ancient of witches! The language of Boudicea, Saints Brigid and Modwenna, even Morgana herself! Perhaps their great powers linger in the sacred runes…"

McGonnagall interceded. "Not exactly, Cressida. Ogham was a Celtic alphabet used to write many languages, including Old Irish, Old Welsh, and Pictish. It is believed to have been…"

"Oh, pish. Alphabet, language, what's the difference?" Cressida interrupted Professor McGonnagall with a wave of her arm. The bangles and crystal bracelets on her wrist jangled angrily. A crease appeared between Minerva's eyebrows.

"The real question is, can we use the runes, the _form_ that magic used to take, to access the _magic itself_? I think Ogham would be an excellent candidate for this kind of experiment. So many well-renowned witches would have spoken Ogham…or languages that were written using the Ogham alphabet, I suppose," Cressida amended after a glance from Professor McGonnagall.

"But most women in those days couldn't write, not even witches," interjected a portly witch with auburn hair and a stern expression. "They wouldn't have been carving these runes on tree stumps in fairy fields, no matter what dear Cressida seems to think. They wouldn't have been studying spells in books of runes. It raises the question: what's the role of orality versus textuality in all this? Is learning to sound out the letters enough? Or is Cressida right that the _images_ of the runes have power greater than the mere meaning of the words?"

"Excellent question, Amelia," said Cressida, "and exactly the reason we need to learn more about these runes. Regardless of orality and textuality, we can all agree that great and powerful women harnessed some unique powers. If they weren't reading or writing, what kind of magic were they doing? Perhaps runes aren't the answer. But all these witches must have had something in common. Boudicea, Morgana, the witch-saints. Perhaps it was language. Perhaps we can use language to learn more about their powers."

"Who's to say that these women and their gifts don't live on?" came a clipped voice that hadn't spoken up before. All of the women looked around the room to find the newcomer. She had tucked herself into a small alcove between the fireplace and the sofa. She wore magenta robes embroidered with gold brocade and a matching shawl over her salt and pepper hair.

"What do you mean, er…?" Cressida squinted at the woman, trying to place her.

"I don't believe we've had the pleasure of meeting. What's your name, dear?" asked Mrs. Weasley with a mite more tact than her neighbor.

"Radha. Radha Patil."

"Radha, then, if that's quite all right with you. What do you mean, Radha?"

"Well, we keep using the past tense to refer to these women and their magic. But just because the English have forgotten their women's magic, doesn't mean it isn't all around us. In Kerala, women have special spells for blessing and deboning the fish our husbands bring home. If it's not done properly, your family can become ill and your children might choke on the bones of the fish. No one knows where this magic comes from. When a girl without mothers or grandmothers come of age, or one of our boys marries a girl from far away, there is no council or committee who teaches the girls these spells. Long ago, almost all of the women in our village died of a terrible illness, Muggle women as well as witches. There was no one left to remember women's crafts and medicine and spells. The only girls left were babies or new wives from outside Kerala. Yet they learned to prepare the fish in exactly the right way so their children did not fall ill or choke. They learned to make healing draughts and charms to ensure the fishermen's prosperity. Kerala is built on women's magic. Even when we forgot the magic for a time, or turned our backs on it, or were forced to conform to the Crown's magical decrees. It has a way of resurfacing. I think England is the same. Built on women's magic. We just have to find it, so we can teach ourselves again."

There was a moment of silence as the women thought about Mrs. Patil's words.

"When you say built on women's magic…"

"Why do you think Platform Nine and Three Quarters is the place where all magical children begin their journey to Hogwarts? In the days before the Hogwarts Express, Hogwarts students still congregated on that exact spot to meet their escorts and fly to Hogwarts on broomsticks. Why? Why not apparate them all to Scotland?"

"Because Boudicea is buried at King's Cross Station," said Cressida breathlessly.

"Precisely. Between platforms nine and ten, do you recall? Platform Nine and Three Quarters doesn't exist because that's where King's Cross Station happens to be. King's Cross Station exists on that very spot because of Boudicea. Morgana only knows what kind of magical protection she provides to every child on his or her way to Hogwarts."

"Boudicea was known to practice divination and martial magic, you know," piped up Mrs. Fawcett. "She set a hare loose and decided which cities to conquer based on where it ran."

The witches were becoming more and more excitable, talking over each other as they offered their own anecdotes, historical facts, and assertions. Luna felt the room grow noticeably warmer as blood rushed into each woman's cheeks. The air smelled of sweat and buzzed with wrackspurts.

Luna's eyelids felt heavier as she listened to the familiar hum of feminine voices. She snuggled deeper into her mother's bosom, stretching her legs over Molly Weasley's lap as well. Luna felt the soft fleshy tummies of her mother and beloved neighbour, enveloping her more comfortably than the quilts and pillows of her own bed. Mrs. Weasley stroked Luna's ankle absentmindedly while she raised questions about the ethics of animal sacrifice in this day and age, even if it was for magical purposes.

Here she was, not alone in a big dark universe warmed only by starlight. In the circle of her mother's arms and Mrs. Weasley's lap and the voices of the rest of the women in the circle, Luna found herself swept away in thoughts that reminded her of butterbeer, warm and fuzzy and comforting. She wondered if Boudicea had a magic wand. Or would it have been a quarterstaff? She wished she could see the auras of all the people in this room. She reckoned Mrs. Weasley would be a pale burnt orange, and Madam Bones would be a deep, somber maroon. Mummy would be a spritely green, or perhaps silver…

An inhuman screech cut through the clamour and laid a blanket of silence over the room like snow. On the mantelpiece, the Lovegoods' cuckoo clock had sprung to life. Out of the tiny door came a miniature witch holding a howling cat. The witch struggled with the cat for several moments before pulling out a wand the size of Luna's fingernail and magicking the cat's skin off. The cat mewed pathetically until the witch submerged it in her pewter cauldron. The witch raised her wand at the cauldron and it bubbled to life once, twice, five times to mark the hour.

"Goodness, is it so late already? So, we are agreed that we should learn Ogham as well as Futhorc? We should also conduct more research on Boudicea," said Cressida with quill in hand.

"Another code to decipher? What fun! I hope this one comes naturally to me like the Futhorc does," said Luna dreamily. "How lovely that they come with little sayings and rhymes to help them stick in my memory. Fletches and houses and things. What helpful little runes. English letters are much nastier. They don't stick in my brain _at all_. Not much distinguishes one from the other, I suppose…or perhaps they are repelled by wrackspurts."

The women smiled at Luna as they began to shuffle out of their seats and gather their hats and handbags. But Minerva McGonnagall stayed in her seat. She had selected the only hard-backed chair in the room and removed the cushion.

"Luna, do you have trouble with the alphabet? You're a b c's I mean, you are clearly a natural with runes," Professor McGonnagall's lips pursed strangely in what Luna could only assume was meant to be a smile.

"I'm utterly hopeless even though Mummy and Daddy say I should be a natural," said Luna with an airy flick of her head. "I've tried everything, even turning the paper upside down and only trying to read during the full moon and eating the pages. I think I'll just do the kind of magic that doesn't require reading and writing. Is there runic magic? Yes, I shall make moon magic runic magic..."

"And…and do your mum and dad teach you to do these things? Eating parchment and reading with the lunar cycle? To help you read?" stammered McGonnagall. Her lips were pursed in an entirely different way now, and they looked ghostly pale in contrast to her flushed cheeks.

"Well, they let me try whatever I like with the books they leave me for my reading lessons. I've only started eating the pages recently. To help me absorb. I thought of it myself," said Luna proudly.

"How dare you. You complete and utter fool," growled Professor McGonnagall.

"Well I don't eat the pages of _really_ old books. They taste musty anyway," said Luna defensively.

"Not you, child," said McGonnagall, "your dunderhead of a mother." The other women in the room froze in place. Amelia Bones had been in the process of putting on her cloak. It was draped over the tip of her pointed hat, obscuring half of her face. Mrs. Weasley gripped Luna's ankle.

"What's this, Minerva?" asked Cressida distractedly. She had been levitating a book to act as a table as she scribbled her notes on parchment.

"I always knew you were a bit soft between the ears, but denying your child a proper education? _Leaving her alone with books as reading lessons?_ How dare you. What do you expect will happen when she arrives at Hogwarts? We are a school of magic, not remedial reading and writing. If she really is the child of prophecy like you claim, how will she take over the world as an illiterate bimbo like her mother?" Several of the women in the room stifled audible gasps.

"Well, Minerva, as I'm sure you'll agree, our Luna is a very bright child. She's certainly capable of directing her own learning." Cressida only paused her scribbling to give Luna a pat on the head.

" _Directing her own learning?_ She's five year's old, for Morgana's sake! Even prodigies cannot teach themselves when they do not know the fundamentals." The book Cressida had been levitating dropped out of mid-air and landed with a dull thud in Luna's lap.

Cressida looked up for the first time and levelled McGonnagall with a stare Luna had never seen before. For the first time, Luna realized how cold blue eyes could be.

"You may not understand because you don't have children of your own and you only teach them in classrooms, with books. But learning doesn't just happen with books. Teaching children doesn't end with a bell ringing and sending them off to the Great Hall and their dormitories. We teach Luna every minute of every day. I don't know what you want me to tell you, Minerva. We do the best we can. It's not easy, with Xeno trying to get _The Quibbler_ off the ground plus working at the institute. I'm Seeing more and more often. It's exhausting and the visions are increasingly terrify-," Cressida paused when she saw Luna's face turned towards her.

"-increasingly difficult. I'm sorry if leaving Luna alone with a book doesn't meet the personal parenting standards of the deputy headmistress of Hogwarts. Like you said, Hogwarts doesn't teach children to read. I'd like to see you try."

The room was silent. Luna could feel her mother's chest heaving against her cheek. McGonnagall opened her mouth to respond, but Mrs. Fawcett broke the silence first.

She started to cry.

"It's the same with us. My Sylvia. Such a bright girl. Can't even write her own name," she blubbered.

"It's just so hard. Victor and I both need to work. I quit my job at the Ministry when my oldest was born, of course. Now I have to work a shift job to make sure one of us can always be home with the children. On my feet all day, I am. It was never like that at the Ministry, even as a junior quill pusher. There's barely enough time to eat and sleep, much less teach them anything other than not to disturb Mummy when she's resting," Mrs. Fawcett wailed.

Radha Patil conjured a crisp handkerchief from thin air and gave it to Mrs. Fawcett. It was embroidered with jasmine flowers which swayed merrily in an invisible breeze. It smelled of jasmine when Mrs. Fawcett blew her nose, and the calming smell soon spread throughout the room.

"There, there, Isolde. My girls are the same. They can read and write and do basic arithmetic, but I know they're behind their Muggle cousins."

"We're not trained teachers, you know," said Molly, "Arthur says Muggle teachers have to study for several years before they're allowed to teach children! Even parents who want to homeschool their children have to get a certification. I think he might be right this time, perhaps the Muggles do sometimes stumble upon the right way of things."

"You know, there are professionally trained wizarding tutors who teach their pupils the basics and also prepare them for Hogwarts. They are very good; I've found their students do well at Hogwarts," said Minerva in clipped tones.

"As if we could afford that, any of us!" cried Mrs. Weasley.

"I don't know how you lot expect us to get on with lives and raise our children to be good, decent people when we're also expected to teach them everything you can't be bothered to do," interjected a new voice.

It was Mrs. Brown. She was quiet at most meetings. Her husband had been killed by the Dark Lord the year before, leaving her with three young children.

"It puts an incredible strain. I need to work to support my children but the Ministry also tells me I need to homeschool them. They said I'd have to pay a fine if I put them in Muggle school. I can't afford the fine, and I _certainly_ can't afford to be out of work for the next fifteen years because the Ministry can't be bothered to establish another school for younger children.' Her voice wobbled, but that made it sound all the fiercer to Luna.

McGonnagall's scowl had softened slightly.

"Bring your children who are under eleven an hour early to our meeting next week. As you are all acutely aware, I am not trained for such things. But I will do my best. I will teach them."

"We'll do it together," said Cressida.

A for Athena, B for Boudicea, C for Circe. Luna Lovegood learned a witches' alphabet, and she finally grew to love it almost as much as she loved runes. She didn't even eat the stars rotated in their eternal orbits on the walls and ceiling of little Luna Lovegood's nursery. Her father emblazoned the name of each constellation in the midnight blue gaps between the celestial clusters. Her mother enchanted the miniature galaxy to rotate just like the original. On the wall in front of her daughter's crib, Cressida painted a moon that was larger than life. Xenophilius took his wand to his wife's handiwork and wrote "LUNA" in script charmed to glow with silvery moonlight.

Their daughter slept bathed in moonlight every night. It tinged her blonde hair silver and gave her pale skin an ethereal glow. Luna was at the center of the mimetic universe her parents created for her, always aware of the world swirling around her. Sometimes the walls of her room felt like unmanageable chaos. She was too young to understand that the stars and planets moved in a measured and orderly dance. She still believed her parents were her anchors, the most predictable things in her life even though her daddy fluttered about sometimes. The world didn't seem so scary when her mother cradled her in her arms and pointed out the names of all the stars, or when her father lifted her in the air and made roaring sounds like a dragon.

When Mummy and Daddy weren't there and Luna felt overwhelmed or scared or her gums ached, she often gazed at the glowing moon on her wall. It was the only thing in the room other than the furniture that was not constantly moving.

"Do you know why we painted that big bright moon over there, my love?" asked Cressida one day as she sat nursing her daughter in the old rocking chair in the corner.

"Moona," repeated Luna proudly, lifting her hand from her mother's breast and pointing at the moon, then at herself.

"Yes, exactly. It's the moon. And your name means moon. Because you're queen of the moon. But do you know what else?" Luna suckled in silence, watching her mother's lips move.

"You were born on a cold stormy night in the middle of winter. It was dark and cold and Mummy was very scared. But when you were born, the moon broke through the clouds. And I saw you, and you had a halo of golden hair and the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen. You brought light into this world of darkness. That is your destiny, Luna. You will be queen of the moon and bring light to the people who live in darkness. You will be a dark queen, a raven queen. I don't know quite what that means yet, but we're going to find out. I'm going to make sure your birth right is restored to you, my sweet girl. The circle will rise again. And we're going to need as much knowledge and power as we can get for what lies ahead of us…" A shadow passed over Cressida's face.

"Luna?"

The child was asleep, her cheek pressed against her mother's breast.

Cressida raised her wand.

Luna Lovegood hated the alphabet.

She turned the paper upside down and squinted at the peculiar markings littering the page. They looked jagged and vicious, like teeth or claws. Luna ran her fingers over the harsh crenulations of the inky letters.

"Daddy, is this where paper cuts come from?"

"Hmm, sugar plum?" Xenophilius looked up from his attempts to feed parchment into his antique typewriter. Father and daughter sat across from each other at the Lovegoods' kitchen table in Ottery St. Catchpole, with Cressida's ornamental crystal wind chime dangling between them.

Luna mimed cutting her little finger on the craggy spikes of a w, the funny little letter she called the saw.

"Ah, ah, ahhh!" she ran her hands erratically over the page and wriggled her fingers as if blood was spurting out of them.

Xenophilius smiled without raising his eyes from his typewriter, which had begun to spew purple smoke.

"Very clever, darling. But paper cuts are caused by miniscule tree and animal sprites who are not happy about being pulped and turned into paper and parchment. Although they're not fond of being turned into Sunday roast or wands, either…"

"Well _I_ think it's something to do with these nasty letters," Luna declared with a huff. "Maybe all the thoughts aren't happy about being turned into words and imprisoned in ink. Why do people even write down their ideas, anyway? I think they should be allowed to float freely through the air. Think of all the brilliant thoughts people aren't having because someone else has already caught them and trapped them in a musty old book somewhere."

"Words aren't the trap, Luna, but the vessel. Ideas can't get very far without words. Don't you want to learn the words for spells? Don't you want to write your ideas down and publish them in _The Quibbler_ so other people can read and respond and learn how clever you are? Ouch!"

The typewriter had bitten her father's finger in protest of his tinkering. Luna giggled. Giving the contraption up as a bad job, Xenophilius began to scribble with his quill. The scratching noise gave Luna goose pimples.

"I don't particularly care about being clever. I want to _discover_ things. Clever people are too busy being clever to find anything new. Oh, but Daddy, do you have to write things down to do magic?"

"Yes, in a way. You have to read and write and practice the words."

"How unpleasant! Perhaps I shan't do magic at all."

Her father's pot of ink skittered across the table, drenching his work in a creeping blot of ink. " _Scourgify_ …Do not jest about such things, Luna."

She started, taken aback, before averting her eyes and tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear.

"Besides, you'll need to read and write if you want to go to Hogwarts. There is a myriad of secrets to be discovered in that great old castle. Wouldn't you like that?"

"Yes, Daddy. But…"

"Hush now. I am a man of words and ink myself, and I need to finish this issue today. I'm really blowing the lid off the exploitation of ghost labor at Muggle haunted houses. The Ministry is really getting too close to their First Minister or whatever he's called. I wonder if the Hallows could have something to do with this…" Xenophilius reached for the gold pendant hanging around his neck. He stumbled out of the kitchen, muttering to himself.

Luna puffed out her cheeks and blew air through her lips. Right. Reading. Dad told her to do her reading. Time to sit still and do her reading. He _did_ have a point, she supposed. She settled into her chair and squinted at the page.

Luna bit her lip.

Her parents always told her how smart she was, what a clever girl she was, how she was destined for great things at Hogwarts and beyond. They played with her and taught her constellations and herbal remedies and explored the garden with her. Her mother braided her hair and her father tickled behind her ears to keep the nargles away. They called her their fairy and their princess and their moon and their raven queen. And Luna believed it. She believed it all.

But neither Cressida nor Xenophilius had bothered to teach their daughter to read. They read her bedtime stories sometimes, but they were just as likely to tell her old myths and fairy stories older than the written word. Often, they entertained her with Xenophilius's ideas and Cressida's prophecies. They told her of a princess named Luna who would one day rule the moon and bring about the return of moon magic.

Luna stared blankly at the jumble of markings on the page. She could decipher individual letters, but they did not yet magically coalesce into the words she knew so well. There was an "l," and a few lines later a "u." And then an "n" and an "a" right next to each other! Luna. Her name. She recognized it from the moon on her wall. In fact, most of her knowledge of letters came from the swirling array of labelled constellations on her walls.

She didn't even know _what_ she was supposed to be reading. Her parents seemed to have decided one day that it was about time Luna learned to read. She was a clever girl, she could figure it out. In fact, she probably already had a natural aptitude for it. How could she, the prophesied one, not? They began calling Luna inside from playing in the garden from time to time and telling her it was time for her reading lessons. They then unceremoniously plopped a book or notebook or an issue of _The Quibbler_ in front of her and left her to her own devices.

Five year old Luna could not make head or tail of the regularity of these "lessons." They did not come every Monday or every Wednesday or even every other week. They didn't seem to follow the path of the stars or the cycle of the moon. They didn't even seem to follow her parents' whims. One day they would mention that she was due for a reading lesson (one time Cressida even Saw a particularly gruelling lesson in Luna's future involving a tome bigger than her head) and the next day they forgot it completely.

Luna hated reading lessons almost as much as she hated the alphabet. And because her parents didn't seem to abide by any schedule in this world or the next, Luna had not yet found a way to avoid them.

She listened for her father's frenzied mutterings but the only sound in the kitchen was the tinkling of the wind chime.

Luna folded the square of paper in half, then half again. She creased the page until it was small enough to fit on the tip of her littlest finger. Then she touched it to the tip of her tongue, tasted it, crinkled her face in distaste, and swallowed. The dry parchment scratched her throat and made her cough. That one had been particularly unpleasant, but she had to absorb the knowledge somehow, she supposed.

Luna wasn't particularly fussed either way. If she was destined to bring forth a new kind of magic, why did she need to bother with any of this tosh? She had decided long ago that her moon magic wouldn't involve any kind of reading or writing whatsoever. Spells seemed equally pointless to her, so she might have to experiment with nonverbal magic….

The sound of laughter from the sitting room punctured Luna's balloon of silence. Just as quickly as she had contemplated her future powers, her mind turned to her mother's book club. She didn't want to _read_ , but perhaps she could catch some of the ideas that were bound to be floating around the air in a room full of a dozen witches. She skipped down the hall, wondering absentmindedly what the books the witches' club read tasted like.

"…Furk what?!" a woman's voice exclaimed with a chortle from inside the room.

"Futhorc," said a stern witch with square spectacles standing at the front of the room. Most of the women giggled in titillation. The tall witch hushed them.

"Oh, admit it Minerva, it sounds an awful lot like…"

"I will not admit such a thing, Amelia. Especially not with little ones around." Minerva McGonnagall gestured to the door, where a small head of blonde hair lurked.

"Have you finished your reading, love?" asked Cressida from her perch on the sofa. Luna looked at her feet before nodding with a shy smile. Behind her back, she squeezed her crossed fingers until they bleached white. Professor McGonnagall looked at the young girl with a frown.

"What a good girl! Come here, my love," said a plump ginger woman.

"Hello, Mrs. Weasley," said Luna as she settled into her neighbor's lap. Her fingers twisted in the worn familiar frays of Mrs. Weasley's jumper.

Professor McGonnagall cleared her throat. "As I was saying, the futhorc are an ancient system of Anglo-Saxon runes. The name futhorc, which you all seemed to find so amusing, is simply a combination of the names for the first three runes, much like the word alphabet."

"The alphabet is nasty! I do not like it _at all_ ," declared Luna with great fervor. The women all chuckled and Luna received several pats on the head. She felt a sudden urge to wash her hair in a solution of rosewater and dirigible plums. She scratched her scalp repeatedly, taking pleasure in feeling her roughness rubbing against the tenderness of her own flesh.

"Don't think of it as an alphabet, then," said McGonnagall with a prim brusqueness that made Luna sit up straighter. "You may think of it as…a special code you need to decipher. The important thing is to learn it, no matter what you call it."

A code. Luna liked the sound of that.

"Now the first letter, like I said, is most commonly pronounced "feoh." It looks like this." McGonnagall drew the rune in the air with a trail of gold emanating from the tip of her wand.

"It looks like an arrow with only two fletches," she said, pointing to the half of the asymmetrical rune with two notches.

"The fletches of feoh come first. Repeat after me. Go on, it helps memory retention."

"The fletches of feoh come first," they all said obediently. Several women raised their wands in the air to recreate the shape of the rune. Luna traced the magical code on the flesh of her forearm. Her skin tingled in a way that it never did when she swallowed the materials of her parents' haphazard reading lessons. She could feel knowledge and power coursing through her veins. _So this is why people write things down._

"Next is ur. This one is easy because it's an upside down 'u.' Observe." Professor McGonnagall traced the rune with her wand again. When she craned her neck, Luna recognized one of the letters from her name on the wall of her room.

In half an hour, Luna learned more about Anglo-Saxon runes than she ever had about the English alphabet. By the end of the professor's session, she could recite and draw all 33 runes from memory. She could even decode runic messages with only a little help from Professor McGonnagall and the syllabary.

"This has all been tremendously helpful, Minerva," said Cressida as she pulled Luna onto her lap.  
"I know I'm looking forward to learning what secrets may be discovered with these runes. Perhaps even _in_ these runes. I wonder whether we should also turn our attention to Ogham. Individual letters have been correlated with sacred woods, and I'd like to see if any of it correlates with wand lore…"

"Er, sorry, but what's Ogham?" asked Mrs. Fawcett, a rail thin woman from the village with mousy brown hair.

"What's Ogham?!" asked Cressida with a snort, "only the language of the most great and ancient of witches! The language of Boudicea, Saints Brigid and Modwenna, even Morgana herself! Perhaps their great powers linger in the sacred runes…"

McGonnagall interceded. "Not exactly, Cressida. Ogham was a Celtic alphabet used to write many languages, including Old Irish, Old Welsh, and Pictish. It is believed to have been…"

"Oh, pish. Alphabet, language, what's the difference?" Cressida interrupted Professor McGonnagall with a wave of her arm. The bangles and crystal bracelets on her wrist jangled angrily. A crease appeared between Minerva's eyebrows.

"The real question is, can we use the runes, the _form_ that magic used to take, to access the _magic itself_? I think Ogham would be an excellent candidate for this kind of experiment. So many well-renowned witches would have spoken Ogham…or languages that were written using the Ogham alphabet, I suppose," Cressida amended after a glance from Professor McGonnagall.

"But most women in those days couldn't write, not even witches," interjected a portly witch with auburn hair and a stern expression. "They wouldn't have been carving these runes on tree stumps in fairy fields, no matter what dear Cressida seems to think. They wouldn't have been studying spells in books of runes. It raises the question: what's the role of orality versus textuality in all this? Is learning to sound out the letters enough? Or is Cressida right that the _images_ of the runes have power greater than the mere meaning of the words?"

"Excellent question, Amelia," said Cressida, "and exactly the reason we need to learn more about these runes. Regardless of orality and textuality, we can all agree that great and powerful women harnessed some unique powers. If they weren't reading or writing, what kind of magic were they doing? Perhaps runes aren't the answer. But all these witches must have had something in common. Boudicea, Morgana, the witch-saints. Perhaps it was language. Perhaps we can use language to learn more about their powers."

"Who's to say that these women and their gifts don't live on?" came a clipped voice that hadn't spoken up before. All of the women looked around the room to find the newcomer. She had tucked herself into a small alcove between the fireplace and the sofa. She wore magenta robes embroidered with gold brocade and a matching shawl over her salt and pepper hair.

"What do you mean, er…?" Cressida squinted at the woman, trying to place her.

"I don't believe we've had the pleasure of meeting. What's your name, dear?" asked Mrs. Weasley with a mite more tact than her neighbor.

"Radha. Radha Patil."

"Radha, then, if that's quite all right with you. What do you mean, Radha?"

"Well, we keep using the past tense to refer to these women and their magic. But just because the English have forgotten their women's magic, doesn't mean it isn't all around us. In Kerala, women have special spells for blessing and deboning the fish our husbands bring home. If it's not done properly, your family can become ill and your children might choke on the bones of the fish. No one knows where this magic comes from. When a girl without mothers or grandmothers come of age, or one of our boys marries a girl from far away, there is no council or committee who teaches the girls these spells. Long ago, almost all of the women in our village died of a terrible illness, Muggle women as well as witches. There was no one left to remember women's crafts and medicine and spells. The only girls left were babies or new wives from outside Kerala. Yet they learned to prepare the fish in exactly the right way so their children did not fall ill or choke. They learned to make healing draughts and charms to ensure the fishermen's prosperity. Kerala is built on women's magic. Even when we forgot the magic for a time, or turned our backs on it, or were forced to conform to the Crown's magical decrees. It has a way of resurfacing. I think England is the same. Built on women's magic. We just have to find it, so we can teach ourselves again."

There was a moment of silence as the women thought about Mrs. Patil's words.

"When you say built on women's magic…"

"Why do you think Platform Nine and Three Quarters is the place where all magical children begin their journey to Hogwarts? In the days before the Hogwarts Express, Hogwarts students still congregated on that exact spot to meet their escorts and fly to Hogwarts on broomsticks. Why? Why not apparate them all to Scotland?"

"Because Boudicea is buried at King's Cross Station," said Cressida breathlessly.

"Precisely. Between platforms nine and ten, do you recall? Platform Nine and Three Quarters doesn't exist because that's where King's Cross Station happens to be. King's Cross Station exists on that very spot because of Boudicea. Morgana only knows what kind of magical protection she provides to every child on his or her way to Hogwarts."

"Boudicea was known to practice divination and martial magic, you know," piped up Mrs. Fawcett. "She set a hare loose and decided which cities to conquer based on where it ran."

The witches were becoming more and more excitable, talking over each other as they offered their own anecdotes, historical facts, and assertions. Luna felt the room grow noticeably warmer as blood rushed into each woman's cheeks. The air smelled of sweat and buzzed with wrackspurts.

Luna's eyelids felt heavier as she listened to the familiar hum of feminine voices. She snuggled deeper into her mother's bosom, stretching her legs over Molly Weasley's lap as well. Luna felt the soft fleshy tummies of her mother and beloved neighbour, enveloping her more comfortably than the quilts and pillows of her own bed. Mrs. Weasley stroked Luna's ankle absentmindedly while she raised questions about the ethics of animal sacrifice in this day and age, even if it was for magical purposes.

Here she was, not alone in a big dark universe warmed only by starlight. In the circle of her mother's arms and Mrs. Weasley's lap and the voices of the rest of the women in the circle, Luna found herself swept away in thoughts that reminded her of butterbeer, warm and fuzzy and comforting. She wondered if Boudicea had a magic wand. Or would it have been a quarterstaff? She wished she could see the auras of all the people in this room. She reckoned Mrs. Weasley would be a pale burnt orange, and Madam Bones would be a deep, somber maroon. Mummy would be a spritely green, or perhaps silver…

An inhuman screech cut through the clamour and laid a blanket of silence over the room like snow. On the mantelpiece, the Lovegoods' cuckoo clock had sprung to life. Out of the tiny door came a miniature witch holding a howling cat. The witch struggled with the cat for several moments before pulling out a wand the size of Luna's fingernail and magicking the cat's skin off. The cat mewed pathetically until the witch submerged it in her pewter cauldron. The witch raised her wand at the cauldron and it bubbled to life once, twice, five times to mark the hour.

"Goodness, is it so late already? So, we are agreed that we should learn Ogham as well as Futhorc? We should also conduct more research on Boudicea," said Cressida with quill in hand.

"Another code to decipher? What fun! I hope this one comes naturally to me like the Futhorc does," said Luna dreamily. "How lovely that they come with little sayings and rhymes to help them stick in my memory. Fletches and houses and things. What helpful little runes. English letters are much nastier. They don't stick in my brain _at all_. Not much distinguishes one from the other, I suppose…or perhaps they are repelled by wrackspurts."

The women smiled at Luna as they began to shuffle out of their seats and gather their hats and handbags. But Minerva McGonnagall stayed in her seat. She had selected the only hard-backed chair in the room and removed the cushion.

"Luna, do you have trouble with the alphabet? You're a b c's I mean, you are clearly a natural with runes," Professor McGonnagall's lips pursed strangely in what Luna could only assume was meant to be a smile.

"I'm utterly hopeless even though Mummy and Daddy say I should be a natural," said Luna with an airy flick of her head. "I've tried everything, even turning the paper upside down and only trying to read during the full moon and eating the pages. I think I'll just do the kind of magic that doesn't require reading and writing. Is there runic magic? Yes, I shall make moon magic runic magic..."

"And…and do your mum and dad teach you to do these things? Eating parchment and reading with the lunar cycle? To help you read?" stammered McGonnagall. Her lips were pursed in an entirely different way now, and they looked ghostly pale in contrast to her flushed cheeks.

"Well, they let me try whatever I like with the books they leave me for my reading lessons. I've only started eating the pages recently. To help me absorb. I thought of it myself," said Luna proudly.

"How dare you. You complete and utter fool," growled Professor McGonnagall.

"Well I don't eat the pages of _really_ old books. They taste musty anyway," said Luna defensively.

"Not you, child," said McGonnagall, "your dunderhead of a mother." The other women in the room froze in place. Amelia Bones had been in the process of putting on her cloak. It was draped over the tip of her pointed hat, obscuring half of her face. Mrs. Weasley gripped Luna's ankle.

"What's this, Minerva?" asked Cressida distractedly. She had been levitating a book to act as a table as she scribbled her notes on parchment.

"I always knew you were a bit soft between the ears, but denying your child a proper education? _Leaving her alone with books as reading lessons?_ How dare you. What do you expect will happen when she arrives at Hogwarts? We are a school of magic, not remedial reading and writing. If she really is the child of prophecy like you claim, how will she take over the world as an illiterate bimbo like her mother?" Several of the women in the room stifled audible gasps.

"Well, Minerva, as I'm sure you'll agree, our Luna is a very bright child. She's certainly capable of directing her own learning." Cressida only paused her scribbling to give Luna a pat on the head.

" _Directing her own learning?_ She's five year's old, for Morgana's sake! Even prodigies cannot teach themselves when they do not know the fundamentals." The book Cressida had been levitating dropped out of mid-air and landed with a dull thud in Luna's lap.

Cressida looked up for the first time and levelled McGonnagall with a stare Luna had never seen before. For the first time, Luna realized how cold blue eyes could be.

"You may not understand because you don't have children of your own and you only teach them in classrooms, with books. But learning doesn't just happen with books. Teaching children doesn't end with a bell ringing and sending them off to the Great Hall and their dormitories. We teach Luna every minute of every day. I don't know what you want me to tell you, Minerva. We do the best we can. It's not easy, with Xeno trying to get _The Quibbler_ off the ground plus working at the institute. I'm Seeing more and more often. It's exhausting and the visions are increasingly terrify-," Cressida paused when she saw Luna's face turned towards her.

"-increasingly difficult. I'm sorry if leaving Luna alone with a book doesn't meet the personal parenting standards of the deputy headmistress of Hogwarts. Like you said, Hogwarts doesn't teach children to read. I'd like to see you try."

The room was silent. Luna could feel her mother's chest heaving against her cheek. McGonnagall opened her mouth to respond, but Mrs. Fawcett broke the silence first.

She started to cry.

"It's the same with us. My Sylvia. Such a bright girl. Can't even write her own name," she blubbered.

"It's just so hard. Victor and I both need to work. I quit my job at the Ministry when my oldest was born, of course. Now I have to work a shift job to make sure one of us can always be home with the children. On my feet all day, I am. It was never like that at the Ministry, even as a junior quill pusher. There's barely enough time to eat and sleep, much less teach them anything other than not to disturb Mummy when she's resting," Mrs. Fawcett wailed.

Radha Patil conjured a crisp handkerchief from thin air and gave it to Mrs. Fawcett. It was embroidered with jasmine flowers which swayed merrily in an invisible breeze. It smelled of jasmine when Mrs. Fawcett blew her nose, and the calming smell soon spread throughout the room.

"There, there, Isolde. My girls are the same. They can read and write and do basic arithmetic, but I know they're behind their Muggle cousins."

"We're not trained teachers, you know," said Molly, "Arthur says Muggle teachers have to study for several years before they're allowed to teach children! Even parents who want to homeschool their children have to get a certification. I think he might be right this time, perhaps the Muggles do sometimes stumble upon the right way of things."

"You know, there are professionally trained wizarding tutors who teach their pupils the basics and also prepare them for Hogwarts. They are very good; I've found their students do well at Hogwarts," said Minerva in clipped tones.

"As if we could afford that, any of us!" cried Mrs. Weasley.

"I don't know how you lot expect us to get on with lives and raise our children to be good, decent people when we're also expected to teach them everything you can't be bothered to do," interjected a new voice.

It was Mrs. Brown. She was quiet at most meetings. Her husband had been killed by the Dark Lord the year before, leaving her with three young children.

"It puts an incredible strain. I need to work to support my children but the Ministry also tells me I need to homeschool them. They said I'd have to pay a fine if I put them in Muggle school. I can't afford the fine, and I _certainly_ can't afford to be out of work for the next fifteen years because the Ministry can't be bothered to establish another school for younger children.' Her voice wobbled, but that made it sound all the fiercer to Luna.

McGonnagall's scowl had softened slightly.

"Bring your children who are under eleven an hour early to our meeting next week. As you are all acutely aware, I am not trained for such things. But I will do my best. I will teach them."

"We'll do it together," said Cressida.

A for Athena, B for Boudicea, C for Circe. Luna Lovegood learned a witches' alphabet, and she finally grew to love it almost as much as she loved runes. She didn't even eat the paper.


End file.
